Tales of Jack the Ripper (17 page)

“All right, boys,” the older man said with deep-voiced authority. “Best we get him up to the house, then.”

The man led the way as the cowboys dragged Blake from the street and up the walk to the porch. The woman leapt out of the path of the charging man, who barked at her, “Eliza—hot soup for our guest.”

“Yessuh,” the girl answered softly, and she scurried off to the kitchen.

The cowboys trampled through the parlor leaving a trail of mud in dust in their wake. They clumsily dropped Blake on a divan and as quickly as they came in, they went back out. The man stood over Blake like a conquering warrior, his hands on his broad hips and a slight smile on his lips. Blake tried to sit up, but the room spun and he fell back into the soft cushioning of the divan.

“No, don’t try to move, son. You’ve had a spell. My girl’s bringing you something to get your strength back up.”

The man shoved a meaty pink hand at Blake and announced, “L. B. Johnson—I’m a doctor, so don’t you worry. You’re in good hands.”

“Mr.—Dr. Johnson, I’m embarrassed terribly,” Blake muttered, turning his head away from the older man’s staring face. Johnson merely laughed as Eliza returned from the kitchen with a serving tray balanced atop her hands.

“Our Eliza’s a fine cook, son, a fine cook. Pea soup, is it?”

The woman nodded as she set the tray down on the adjacent table where Blake could see a ceramic bowl filled to the top with a steaming green goop. His stomach flipped. He sat up at once, his face hot and vision blurred. Somewhere in the blur Eliza lingered nervously, eyeing him with something like suspicion but not quite fear. Blake stood up, shakily.

“I mustn’t impose, Doctor,” he said. “I’m wanted elsewhere, you understand.”

“But, young fellow…”

“Thank you, Dr. Johnson. And thank you, Ms. Eliza. I’m sure your soup is lovely.”

Johnson sputtered and Eliza took several long strides toward the kitchen as Blake staggered for the door. The woman’s perfume intercepted him halfway, striking his senses like hammer on nails. Did servants permit themselves such niceties? Perhaps, he reasoned, it was a gift from her employer. Perhaps the venerable physician insisted upon Eliza smelling pretty in his presence. Blake reached for the door handle and fell gasping out of the house as he lurched down the steps from the porch and hurried back to Cypress Street. Behind him Dr. Johnson appeared in the open doorway.

“Be careful, son! Be careful!”

As his head cleared and his stomach settled, Blake rushed around the corner to Jacinto Street. He glanced back at the doctor’s big house and saw Eliza exiting from the back through the servant’s door, holding up her skirts as she traversed the tall grass to a shack on the far end of the property. She was a pretty woman, if in a deeply glum sort of way, and Blake could not help but notice how gracefully she moved. He shook it off, disinterested, and kept on until the house and the shack and the sad servant girl were far behind him.

There was only one woman who could fill his thoughts beyond his desire for her to do so, and she had ruined him. He had no room for another.

Still, when Blake found himself wandering the streets in a drunken stupor in the wee hours of the night that followed, he was surprised to discover that he had returned to the corner of Jacinto and Cypress streets, the address of Dr. L. B. Johnson. He paused on the very spot upon which Luly stood when he saw her early in the day, stayed there for several minutes as if he could absorb the air she breathed and exhaled into his skin. He wondered if she ever laughed, and if so what it might sound like. It occurred to him that he had never heard her voice at all. She was a spirit, a creature of smoke and mist. Was it her utter unavailability that twisted his guts so? She was a dagger in his ribs, poison on his lips. He felt his knees buckle and his heart started to pound a savage tattoo against the inside of his chest. Blake dropped to the ground, buried his face in his hands and cried.

He invoked her name and the name of Christ in the same desperate moan when a high-pitched shriek split the air and his skin grew cold. A policeman’s whistle pierced the night and a woman’s voice screamed, “Murder! Murder here!”

The policeman tramped by Blake and over Johnson’s property, blowing his terrible whistle all the while as lights flared up in nearly every window in the house. People poured out of the back, each in possession of a lantern or lamp, and a confused chorus of shouting voices rose up.

“Dead!” the woman screeched. “My god, she’s dead!”

“Look out!” a deep voice boomed. “Get the women inside.”

Before he realized what he was doing, Blake was bounding for the shack. The door stood open and the policeman was already inside, frozen with horror at the bloody tableau before him:

A pile of pillows on the dusty floor, soaked with blood, atop of which the corpse lay.

Her head cleaved in half, clear down to the chin, exposing brain and skull and a pool of syrupy blood.

Eliza Shelley wore only her nightdress, badly torn to expose both her breasts and her nether regions. Like Mollie Smith before her, Eliza had been outraged.

In a dark corner a child whimpered and wept. The policeman raised his lantern to illuminate a trembling colored boy, grasping a blanket tightly and staring with wet, wild eyes at the mutilated corpse. At once Blake deduced the boy to be Eliza’s son. He put a hand to his mouth, horrified that this child must have seen the entire horrible spectacle.

“You, get out of here!” the policeman roared at him. “Go on, get out!”

Blake obliged, having seen more than enough of the abused remains of the woman who served him soup mere hours earlier. In the yard Dr. Johnson paced nervously like a new father, a pipe in his hand and a fretful scowl on his face. More policemen arrived, including an imperious man with a walrus mustache and a high brown bowler. Blake recognized him from the Mollie Smith event the previous winter. The man shot a squinting glance at Blake on his way to the shack. Blake stole away to the street, his cheeks flushed hot and his heart racing. Behind him, the mustachioed man shouted, “Who is that man?”

But Blake kept on. Soon he found himself at the batwing doors of a saloon where a tinkering piano clinked away at a clumsy tune. He leaned against a lonely corner of the bar and drained a bottle of rye whiskey into his gullet as quickly as possible, ignoring the sloshing spittoon by his feet. When he saw through the bottom of the bottle he demanded another one. The barman brought it over as a pockmarked roughneck sidled up to the bar and declared, “Another nigra got kilt!”

Blake promptly vomited into the spittoon and collapsed onto the sawdust covered floor.

V.

The implication was clear. He failed to wrap his addled mind around it, to comprehend how it was possible or why it should be, but Blake could see plainly now that his love for Eula Phillips was
dangerous.

Love, he now knew, had its consequences, though he knew not how it could be. His sorrow—all-consuming as it was—not only haunted him like an ever-present black cloud, but that cloud seemed to deal out bloody strikes wherever his nightly wanderings took him. Absurd, yes, but inescapable. Even if Blake was no murderer, murder appeared to precede him. His heart was filled with the horror of solitude, and in the largely inebriated weeks that followed the gruesome death of Eliza Shelley, he could sense the horror spreading, ever outward.

On the twenty-first of May, Blake once again espied Luly in the company of her rakish husband, sucking oysters by the street-side window at Bulion’s restaurant, and his misery ran rampant. He stomped directly to Guy Town from there, sucked down a gallon of strong beer in the tavern before climbing atop a table and pronouncing his intent to take the first whore who caught his eye. Unaware that tears spilled from eyes while he shouted thus, Blake dropped to a stoop and scanned the rowdy assemblage until his eyes fell upon none other than the pretty, ashen-faced harlot Delilah. A cruel grin cut across his face, whereupon he announced, “And it came to pass that he loved a woman whose name was
Delilah
!”

The whore blanched, her mouth agape, and scuttled back behind the bar while cowboys guffawed and the tinkerer at the piano resumed his tuneless key pounding. Blake laughed too, but in a moment his eyes blurred and his head reeled like a child’s top—his shoes slipped out from under him and he dropped freely backward, meeting the hard-packed dirt floor with a shower of twinkling sparks that heralded the end of his consciousness.

He awoke, piecemeal, to cool water trickling down his brow. Blake had never been in a sporting girl’s boudoir before and was surprised to see, through narrowed eyes, how clean and conservative everything looked, never mind the lingering tang of male sweat and seed. There was lace atop every surface, from dresser to end-tables, and a vaguely Oriental-looking basin sat sloshing in the lap of the bedside girl, who dipped a kerchief into the clear water and let it drip, drip, drip onto his flushed face. His head was half-sunken into a mound of feather-stuffed pillows and his body covered with a pink and yellow quilt. He turned his eyes toward the girl beside him, and for the briefest moment bethought her to be Luly—a dream vision that dissipated like mist in the sun when the girl leaned close and smiled with what few teeth she had left.

“Took you a nasty spill there,” she drawled. Her breath smelled like caramel and gin.

Blake lifted his head and felt it slosh, his brains liquefied, just like the water in the basin. He was still drunk as Cooter Brown.

“Nobody cares about them, you know,” he rasped, the reverberations of his own voice like hammers crashing against the inside of his skull.

“Who, darlin’? Who don’t they care ’bout?” She kept on with the kerchief and water ran in rivulets, spilled over the ridge of his brow and into his eye. He did not so much as blink.

“Negresses,” he explained. “By Christ, you whores will be next. Why, were it my Luly, old John Ireland himself would hunt the bastard down.”

“What’s all this ’bout Negresses and Gov’nor Ireland, sugar? You’re plum drunk and you ought to see a sawbones on account o’ that fall you took.”

“By Jesus, you whores’ll be next,” Blake said.

VI.

The end of summer brought subtle relief from the stifling heat, and also a fresh spate of killings. An eleven-year-old colored girl was discovered in a backyard wash house, ravaged by her attacker and ended with an iron rod that entered one ear and exited the other. When Blake heard the news, he laughed even while tears rolled down his drink-reddened cheeks. He had not been to the apothecary in weeks by then, selecting instead a series of gambling dens and cathouses for the working hours. Proper Austin life was all but behind him now; Blake had transformed into a resident citizen of Guy Town.

The child, name of Mary Ramey, engendered as much outrage as the city could muster, considering. Yet when the next servant girl met her end, no one whispered Mary’s name—it was already forgotten in light of the phantom murderer’s freshest victory. Of poor Gracie Vance’s state upon discovery in the stable back of the boss’s house, the
Austin Daily Statesman
roused most of the capital’s horror with lurid descriptions of the woman’s jellied brains, spilled out of her split skull. Said the sporting girl whose bed Blake shared the night of the Vance killing: “At least her husband hasn’t got to mourn her—he took an ax to the back of the head.”

Still no one seemed to inquire as to
who
was behind the savagery, nor what could be done to put a stop to it. Not seriously, at any rate.

“Dime novel fascination,” he muttered furiously, slipping away from the boudoir in search of a bottle. The girl remained where she lay in a blur of dust motes suspended in the dim lamplight, the
Statesman
spread out before her as though it was a map to secret treasure. “Damn your eyes.”

Outside the clammy air of the whorehouse, the warm September night embraced Blake like a mother. He paused beneath a streetlamp and glanced back at the building, the same “hotel” to which he had trailed Luly nearly a year hence, the night the first of what were now six bloody murders took place. Blake rolled on his heels, grasped the lamppost for support, and squeezed his eyes shut while he tried to remember all of their names.
Molly and Eliza and Irene and wee little Mary and Gracie (and poor Orange Washington too).
He did not really have to try at all.

Christ Jesus, but what was she doing here?
he wondered, peering at the window through which he watched her—her and that strange, reedy man. Her, an heiress to founding Texas families for the love of God, secreted away to a stinking knocking shop…

The whores will be next
, he reminded himself.

Blake reached up to scratch around his collar and was surprised to find he wasn’t wearing one. In fact, he stood on the street, some time past midnight, in his shirt sleeves like a vagrant. He shook his head, still feeling the spectral irritation from a collar that was not there, and somewhere distant a crackling report sounded. Rowdy cowboys, Blake knew, raising hell. Elsewhere, Austin’s gentry—perhaps Jimmy Phillips and his bride Eula among them—toasted their gilded glasses to this new Gilded Age for Texas.

And still elsewhere: a devil crept the night, punishing Blake Prentiss and his overburdened conscious for the crime of adoring an unattainable heart. Fraught with horror at this knowledge, he dropped to his knees and wept into his hands, hands that might as well have dripped with the blood of six butchered corpses.